The First Tesla Model S in Iran and Central Asia

Charging in Edirne, Turkey

The first bigger town that we reached after the Bulgarian/Turkish border was Edirne. It was already early in the evening and again, we needed a hotel to stay at. The plan was to drive very early the next day to Istanbul. We wanted to be at the Uzbek Consulate in Istanbul before 10 a.m. to apply for our visa. Since our car was still pretty good charged and because we knew that charging should be easy in Istanbul, we stayed in Edirne in an very simple hotel that only offered us Schuko on their parking lot.

We bought that night two tourist SIM-cards for our phones. We thought that we need them to simplify our navigation through Turkey. The Tesla still had internet connection in Edirne, even though the city is already about 50km far from the border. What we didn’t expect that day, was that we would never loose internet connection till we left Turkey to Georgia more than a week later. We have a Tesla-roaming SIM-card with which we are supposed to be online all throughout the European Union (and Switzerland, of course). When we left Croatia, as the last European Country, we immediately lost the signal after the border. When we entered Bulgaria as the first European country after the Balkan countries, we immediately got the internet reception back (what made us quite excited 😉). Back to our SIM-cards: since we had internet in the Tesla, the urgent need wasn’t there anymore. But that these SIM-cards (by Vodafone) never started working (somehow the activation did not work) annoyed us. Two visits to Vodafone stores and lot of discussions and waiting didn’t help either. One cannot always be lucky…